Another year has passed and it was another great recording season with 152,711 records submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal in 2024.
Records were received from 8,301 individual recorders across all 32 counties. The continuing trend of the majority of recorders only submitting one recorder has actually grown in 2024, accounting for 62% of all recorders. Interestingly, for having a lower number of overall records submitted in 2024 compared to that of 2023, the number of recorders submitting data actually increased. Similar to other years, there is a small but dedicated cohort of recorders (40 in 2024) who are submitting over 1,000 records through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal. 7 Recorders submitted more than 2000 records during the period.
Similar to other years, the small group of recorders submitting more than 500 recorders is just less than 1% of all recorders but they submitted more than 60% of all records in 2024.
Flowering Plants were once again the most commonly recorded taxonomic group in 2024 with almost 37,000 records submitted. Birds were not far behind with almost 36,000 records submitted. Moths were once again the third most recorded taxonomic group through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal. Terrestrial Mammals and Butterflies were the next most commonly recorded groups. More than ¾ of all records submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal in 2024 belong to one of the above taxonomic groups.
The recording activity and the trends that show year on year are very interesting for ourselves in the centre and hopefully also for you, our recorder network. An interesting one that is the same from 2023 is that, the Flowering Plants group was the most heavily recorded group in 2024, however, no species from that group found their way into the Top 10 most recorded species. The breakdown of the most commonly recorded species can be seen here:
What’s noticeable from the table above is that three of the species are from specific ongoing projects, including Red Fox (Urban Fox Survey) Hedgehogs (Irish Hedgehog Survey) and 7-Spot Ladybird (Ladybird Atlas 2025). This shows the importance of citizen science and how it can quickly begin to generate large quantities of data from across the country.
A reminder that Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal is available to be used by anyone; if you see a species and are sure of its identification, please submit the details to https://records.biodiversityireland.ie/ so that the observation can be added to our national datasets. This will allow us to continue to build the knowledge base on what species we have in Ireland and help us to better understand how they are distributed.
A massive thank you to all recorders who submitted data in 2024, the time, effort and expertise which goes in to collecting this data is huge and we are greatly appreciative that these records are submitted through Ireland’s Citizen Science Portal.
